An essential part of a wireless service provider's business is its ability to provide adequate communication capabilities to its customers. In order to provide said capabilities, wireless service providers deploy communication antennas on towers, rooftops, buildings, and other tall structures. The height of such structures allows the radio signal from each communication antenna to travel several miles, establishing a geographic area within which service may be provided to customers. Wireless service providers typically install several directional communication antennas per site as multiple directional communication antennas are needed for increased capacity and reception.
In order to provide the required radio signal throughout a defined area, each directional antenna is intended to face a specific direction (referred to as “azimuth”) relative to true north, to be inclined at a specific downward angle with respect to the horizontal in the plane of the azimuth (referred to as “downtilt”) and to be vertically aligned with respect to the horizontal (referred to as “skew”). Undesired changes in azimuth, downtilt, and skew will detrimentally affect the coverage of a directional antenna. These alignments may be likened to the axes commonly used to describe the attitude of an aircraft: Azimuth corresponds to the yaw of an aircraft about a vertical axis; skew corresponds to the roll of an aircraft about its longitudinal axis; and downtilt corresponds to the pitch of the nose of an aircraft above or below a horizontal plane (or about a lateral axis extending horizontally through the aircraft at right angles to the longitudinal axis). In general, the more accurate the installation, the better the network performance that may be achieved within the area served by the antenna. Directional antenna installations are performed by tower companies who use certified tower climbers to carry out these installations.
Due to inaccurate and user subjective antenna installation techniques used by many tower companies, a need has grown for the use of GPS Antenna Alignment Devices. These devices for many years have been very large in size and challenging to attach to the host Antenna.
Thus, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art systems, designs, and processes as discussed above.